The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights: A Case Study of the Instrument's Conceptualisation of Democracy and Democratisaton

In recent years the idea and practice of democracy promotion has gained con-siderable attention and exists on every international organisation’s agenda. Due to the contestability of the concept of democracy, promoters are in front of a variety of instruments. The European Union is not an exception and in 2006 the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights was established as the concrete ex-pression of promoting democracy and human rights in developing countries. However, where one can categorise democracy promotion efforts according to the two main approaches to the field – the political and the developmental approach, building on a division of the conceptualisation of democracy – the EIDHR is sometimes criticised for being indirect in its methods. So in order to categorise the instrument, the paper applies an analytical framework consisting of three dimen-sions generated from the two approaches. Moreover, the paper applies an idea-tional analysis, aiming to scrutinise the rhetoric of the instrument. The findings suggest the instrument to rather be developmental than political